Ok, Ethernet's fine too, but what you really want is some 1-2" conduit to a central location, so you can easily rewire the house with whatever kind of wiring you need decades down the road, if anything's still using wire. Maybe it's for audio, or fiber for something, whatever, but you won't really know. Expect that somebody in the future is going to want to put the TV/stereo/whatever on the other side of the room from where you want it, and run conduit there too. And make sure there are enough electrical sockets in enough places (though current electric codes mostly do that already.)
Also, you want wider doors, because you or whoever you sell the house to in the future may be old enough to need a wheelchair, and an extra six inches of width makes moving furniture a lot easier also. And you want good insulation, and wiring from your HVAC vents to your server closet (because at some point you might want to automate those) and maybe an occasional niche high up in a wall to put whatever electrical stuff there makes sense (e.g. a clock or fan or TV.)
A one-level house typically doesn't have a basement:-) But actually I'm guessing it's the opposite situation - her mother's moved in with them, and they're getting mom's house ready to sell. If you're an older geek, that's not an uncommon situation, especially if your parents are divorced or one's died.
When the politicians gave us a referendum on California's high speed rail, it was for a $10B bond issue, which was going to cover about 1/3 of the $30B cost, and the rest was going to be paid for by train tickets and Magic Money Falling Out Of The Sky. Then after the bond issue passed, they noticed it was really $40B, because they'd forgotten that they'd have to pay interest on the money. Now it's up to about $80-100B, depending on who's giving the speech. Also, the voter guide statements with the original bond issue said that train tickets from SF to LA would cost about $55, which is a bit cheaper than buying Southwest Airlines tickets in advance on a good sale; when they re-evaluated the costs, they started saying $110.
You've got it backwards - if I wanted Linux to be purely a server OS, I'd be fine with administering it over ssh with an occasional https light-GUI tool. With Linux on a desktop running an X window server, I can also run graphical applications on other not-purely-server Linux machines. Also, as VMware and its competitors in the dedicated and cloud businesses are proliferating, more and more things are becoming servers (even my laptop, which often has multiple VMware clients running.)
It would be nice if X had evolved a bit more than it has, but simply running it on machines that are thousands of times more powerful than the Sun 3/50 and 386/33 I first used for X windows in the 1980s really is a good start.
So if I want to have my desktop connected to a few dozen target machines using RDP, how do you suggest I do it? Keep a few dozen RDP login windows active? Clunky! At that point I might as well just run a few dozen ssh sessions, or stick to browser-based management applications. RDP is fine if I want to talk to one machine at a time (and in fact my Windows desktop usually has an RDP session to a Windows server on my lab network, which has a few dozen ssh and browser sessions open running management applications, because they're mostly on target machines that don't run X.)
(And if all your foes are spelling or grammar Nazis, that means you only make enemies of intelligent people, which _is_ a step up from the kinds of enemies lots of people have, I suppose....)
My normal work environment is a Win7 laptop, either on a 10 Mbps LAN at work or VPN from home, with Windows Remote Desktop Protocol connection through a firewall to a Win2008 server (currently running on VMware ESXi), which runs browsers and putty SSH connections to a variety of other machines in my lab. For the things it does, it mostly works ok. Cut&paste works pretty well, remote disk mounting is possible though I don't use it much, web pages with no sound and not too much movement render ok. Watching Youtube with sound on fails badly - way too jerky and painfully out of sync. Youtube with the sound off redraws the pictures better, but especially full-screen you can see the redraws happening on the LAN, and worse remotely. Traffic webcams do fine, network performance graphers do fine. On a LAN, it's better than running Motif on a 386/33 was (ok, it's better than that, because I've got a 1920x1080 32-bit screen instead of a 640x480 8-bit screen... but considering that I've got a few thousand times more horsepower now, it ought to be enough better to be extremely transparent.)
So just this morning I had to reboot my Win7 machine, because I had an RDP session that wouldn't die. Was it because I hibernated the machine to bring it in to the office, disconnecting the VPN in the process? I don't know, but the "Are you sure you really want to close the window, we'll save the session for you, is that ok?" dialog box wouldn't go away and wanted to be on top.
Win7 really is a lot better than XP, and XP was a lot better than 95/SE/ME were, but I still have to reboot it a couple of times a month. And stuff doesn't die for no good reason anywhere near as often as it used to (except Firefox, but our work IT department insists on using older versions with long-term support:-) (And at least Firefox saves its sessions relatively cleanly when it dies, unlike IE8.) And since I'm sometimes using an external monitor as well as the laptop screen, when I'm just on the laptop, sometimes there will be windows I can't open because they're on the Other Screen. If I were using X, these things wouldn't be problems.
The important thing about X is very precisely the fact that it's a client-server protocol with network transparency, so the client app doesn't need to be on the same machine as the display server. When I was a sysadmin supporting a bunch of machines, the ability to have lots of windows on my screen that were running clients on lots of different hosts was really valuable, and now that I'm running VMware, I'd be a lot happier if I could do the same thing instead of running a lot of ssh logins and the VMware console widget. It's a bit less critical than it used to be, because lots of the "remote desktop" functionality is built into browsers now, but the tradeoff is big ugly browsers that crash a lot, burn gigabytes of RAM, and aren't very fast.
There are other windowing protocols that also do this (for instance, NeWS, which renders things in Postscript, so what you see is not only what you get, but it's also what you want, and it supports downloading functions to the server so you can avoid round-trips during mouse motion, etc.), but the network transparency is the big win. Running NeWS on an 8MB Sun-3/50 was quite nice, even though these days I've got wristwatches with more horsepower.
No, unfortunately I made the mistake of looking at Twitter, which asploded when the debate started, so I'm still here:-) Time to tune the instruments and head out the door.
The important feature about X Windows was Network Transparency - You could run an application on one computer with its screen output and keyboard and mouse input on a different computer. Sure, there are other ways to do it - lots of ssh sessions, or web browsing (especially with AJAX etc.), or competing window systems like NeWS, or screen emulators like VNC and Windows Remote Desktop - but fundamentally it's a lot cleaner to have some kind of network-transparent window system than to have an application need to drive a "screen" on its own machine.
25 years later, do we still need this? Yes! Virtual machines are taking over the computer business, so you can't expect the application to be running on your desktop (even if it _is_ running in a VM on top of your desktop), screens are a wide range of different sizes and capabilities (laptops, tablets, big monitors, etc., which often don't resemble the machine the app is running on), web browsers are getting used in increasingly complex ways because Windows didn't have a convenient X interface, and there's more and more ugliness around, and more waste of resources trying to emulate things that X did adequately well.
There are lots of good reasons to replace X, but Network Transparency is still the core feature, even if you want the application to have more control over the screen and its associated hardware than we had back in the 1980s, or if you want to move processing functions to different points between the client and the server (e.g. NeWS and NeXT's Display Postscript did some things differently, and Plan 9 and its successors had their own opinions about how to implement everything), but if Wayland doesn't offer Network Transparency yet, it's not an adequate X replacement.
It's not like Obama doesn't have trolls also, but trolls have had more than four years of practice with Obama, and they've occasionally thought of things besides the Birther schtick. But hey, feeding an occasional troll can be fun.
The military-industrial complex likes Romney (especially with Ryan saying that cutting the Pentagon's pork barrel budget is not an option for reducing the deficit), though they haven't been too upset with Obama either (he didn't arrest them all, kept the wars going, and his "cuts" to their budget have been reductions in the rate of increase, not actual cut cuts.)
China's also happy that Ryan isn't serious about cutting the deficit.
Banksters like Romney's commitment to not regulating them, though they were pretty happy about Obama bailing lots of them out.
Vlad Putin wants an American President who's not stupid enough to blow up the world.
The Castro Bros are happy if America maintains enough isolation for them to stay in power, instead of opening up travel so they get flooded with tourists spending money the government can't control.
Ahmadinejad is happy to have a US president backing Israel's hard-line saber-rattlers enough that he can keep his own country in line by rattling sabers back at them, and knows that the US can't afford to invade Iran.
I haven't heard Chavez supporting Obama, but if he did he was probably drunk at the time. At least Obama hasn't sent in the Pentagon to help the oil companies overthrow him.
And Morsi? He'd like to be solidly in charge, but his position is too unstable. He can't afford to get Romnesia, but he's waving his Etch-A-Sketch around every week depending on which way the wind is blowing.
Perry Metzger tweeted the following suggested political debate drinking game - if a political debate comes on, turn on the TV and go out for a drink with your friends!
(In this case I'm going out for a music jam with friends instead, but it'll do the job.)
Yes. (Ok, probably no, because I'm lazy and didn't like most cars on the market, but I should have done something different when I was in your place:-) I went through these calculations about a year ago, having driven my mid-80s Chevy van into the ground (well, driven it 110K miles, replaced the engine, driven it another 110K miles, decided not to replace the transmission.) A typical car lasts about 200K miles, so it will use 200K/mpg gallons over its lifetime, gas will cost about $5/gallon, so that's $1million/mpg. (You can quibble about the numbers, but they're in the right ballpark, and $1M is a nice round shiny attractive number.)
That means a 50mpg Prius will need $20K of gas, a 33mpg Honda will need $30K of gas, a 20mpg minivan will need $50K of gas, and 11mpg BMW will need $90K of gas. The Prius cost about $8K more than the 33mpg car I bought, and would have saved about $10K of gas, so that's pretty close. And 2013 car engine models are a few mpg better than the mid-2012 models (I got an early-2012; a bunch of manufacturers didn't have their new engine models out until October/November.)
What I obviously should have done was replace my van with a Prius a couple of years ago when I started a job with a long commute, when there was still a huge tax deduction for buying Priuses - the second van engine only got about 13mpg, so I probably spent $15-20K in gas during its last 50,000 miles. Making a car isn't zero-footprint for the environment, but I was burning through twice its weight in gasoline a year.
Two tanks of gas ago, the radio was reporting $3.99 as the lowest price in half a dozen parts of the Bay Area, and I was mainly seeing under $4.10 at the cheaper stations and $4.20-4.30 at the pricier ones. This week my local cheap station jumped from $3.99 to to $4.07 and then to $4.47 for cash, 10c more for credit. Today in San Francisco the cheaper stations were mostly $4.49 and the expensive ones were $4.75 (though I haven't driven that route recently enough to know what their usual price gap is.)
I haven't tried Diaspora, but while they did need to get the technology to be marginally adequate, so they don't alienate users, their biggest hurdle was going to be to get users to adopt it in the first place. The reason to join Facebook was never that it was technically cool, it was that it was at least marginally usable and half a billion other people were joining it, including your relatives and you actual in-real-life friends and the people you went to high school with and the people who you used to know on Myspace and that girl you met hula-hooping outside the concert the other night.
And the reason to stay on Facebook was not only to talk to those people, but because you got hooked on Farmville when one of your not-actually-real-life friends sent you a shrubbery and you decided to put out a hit on your other friend who'd just become Godfather in Mafia Wars, so you got sucked into the online cow-clicking game environment, plus it was what your friends started using for party announcements. And the combination of Facebook and its add-ons was enough to keep lots of people sticking around there to be marketable eyeballs instead of migrating off to the next such mud/LambdaMoo/Friendster/Orkut/LiveJournal/MySpace/Instagram competitor, maybe not forever but at least long enough to get an IPO out the door.
Diaspora had to find ways to attract some of those users, enough to get social critical mass. If the technology was too broken to get people to stick around after the initial "We're Not Facebook" PR campaign, it could be too hard to get those people back after fixing it (and without enough users, it's hard to get the momentum to get it fixed.) So what's next - CryptoCat?
Hardly an innovation - people have been wearing fake leather and fake fur for a long time. (That's not even counting the kinksters wearing latex or vinyl because they like how it feels.)
You've probably seen Vegan Black Metal Chef's rubber outfit that looks a lot like leather-based metal-head outfits. (And if you haven't, you really should.)
There have been some sensible, non-crazy Muslims being interviewed on the radio in the past week, and while they haven't been boring, they've been on National Public Radio, which is the wrong network to listen to when you need your fix of crazy.
The real question you should be asking yourself, punk, is why aren't there any sensible non-crazy Muslims standing up on Fox News and denouncing these lunatics.
Sensible non-crazy Muslims get tired of being blamed for all this crap. And when they do speak up and try to do something long-term about it, like Feisal Abdul Rauf, crazy non-sensible Muslim-haters go all Pam Geller on them and accuse them of building terrorist victory mosques. (Hint, Rauf's a Sufi - the attacks made about as much sense as attacking Quakers for supporting terrorism.) (Not that that stops the FBI from infiltrating Quaker peace groups, of course, or Al-Qaeda and their Wahhabi buddies from tearing down Sufi shrines, or Persian imams from declaring fatwas against Salmon Rushdie or the Baha'is.)
Yeah, blasphemy laws are pretty strongly religious intolerance - even though blasphemy laws are also strong protections against religious intolerance (for some religions. Probably not yours.)
In Saudi Arabia, it's illegal to teach polytheism. Christianity and Judaism may not be treated well, but they're tolerated as religions that worship the same One True God that Abraham worshiped even though they haven't yet accepted that Mohammad came to teach the world more about God, and even though the Muslims think the Christians have really strange ways of counting up to "One". But the Middle Eastern pagan pantheons that predated monotheism are Right Out, and Hinduism is also polytheist (even with the "everything is really All One" parts of Hinduism.) And Islam is even more insistent on banning idols than 16th and 17th-century Protestants were in the Europe's religious wars.
For the most part, Hinduism isn't as hung up about blasphemy as the monotheistic religions are, unless you happen to run into the Shiv Sena on a bad day, but if they're going to pass any blasphemy laws they'd probably include banning preaching monotheism and certainly include a ban on disrespectfully destroying statues of the gods and shrines to the gods.
Yes, there are some sets of Islamic right-wingers who don't want women to be educated, just like there are American right-wingers who think a woman's place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
But there are lots more Muslims who want all of their kids to be educated, and who want everybody else's kids to be educated as well, and want their kids to grow up to be educated adults. And even most sexist pigs who want their wives to stay home in the kitchen still want them to be educated enough to educate their kids, which is a job that happens at home as well as school, and want their daughters to be able to get the best husbands they can so they'll have good grandchildren and take care of their parents in their old age. And they want their wives to be able to help run the farm or the shop or whatever they're doing.
And the people who move off the farm and out of the village and go to the big city, like most of the world's population is doing? All of them realize that education is the key to survival.
If your main use of the computer is web, email, etc., then an 8GB SSD running your operating system and applications can make a significant startup difference - and it's probably $20 these days.
Yarrr! Obviously a town named Eichberg is in the mountains, but they've got a creek, and they're about 5km from the Rhein River, where there's all sorts of opportunity for river piracy, Lorelei sirens, and the border with Austria. And about 30km away is Lake Constance (or Bodensee, in German), which is certainly big enough for piracy.
Actually we're mostly using the underground laboratory to test firewalls, intrusion detection hardware, VPN tunnel servers, and occasionally routers. And we're testing management systems for all of the above. (And for Anonymous Coward's comment, we don't have a couple megawatts, but we're up to about 200 amps or so:-)
Our corporate real estate mafia are moving us to an undisclosed location next year (we're assuming it's the main office up the road, where they're moving the people upstairs from us who have normal desks.)
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Ok, Ethernet's fine too, but what you really want is some 1-2" conduit to a central location, so you can easily rewire the house with whatever kind of wiring you need decades down the road, if anything's still using wire. Maybe it's for audio, or fiber for something, whatever, but you won't really know. Expect that somebody in the future is going to want to put the TV/stereo/whatever on the other side of the room from where you want it, and run conduit there too. And make sure there are enough electrical sockets in enough places (though current electric codes mostly do that already.)
Also, you want wider doors, because you or whoever you sell the house to in the future may be old enough to need a wheelchair, and an extra six inches of width makes moving furniture a lot easier also. And you want good insulation, and wiring from your HVAC vents to your server closet (because at some point you might want to automate those) and maybe an occasional niche high up in a wall to put whatever electrical stuff there makes sense (e.g. a clock or fan or TV.)
A one-level house typically doesn't have a basement :-) But actually I'm guessing it's the opposite situation - her mother's moved in with them, and they're getting mom's house ready to sell. If you're an older geek, that's not an uncommon situation, especially if your parents are divorced or one's died.
When the politicians gave us a referendum on California's high speed rail, it was for a $10B bond issue, which was going to cover about 1/3 of the $30B cost, and the rest was going to be paid for by train tickets and Magic Money Falling Out Of The Sky. Then after the bond issue passed, they noticed it was really $40B, because they'd forgotten that they'd have to pay interest on the money. Now it's up to about $80-100B, depending on who's giving the speech. Also, the voter guide statements with the original bond issue said that train tickets from SF to LA would cost about $55, which is a bit cheaper than buying Southwest Airlines tickets in advance on a good sale; when they re-evaluated the costs, they started saying $110.
You've got it backwards - if I wanted Linux to be purely a server OS, I'd be fine with administering it over ssh with an occasional https light-GUI tool. With Linux on a desktop running an X window server, I can also run graphical applications on other not-purely-server Linux machines. Also, as VMware and its competitors in the dedicated and cloud businesses are proliferating, more and more things are becoming servers (even my laptop, which often has multiple VMware clients running.)
It would be nice if X had evolved a bit more than it has, but simply running it on machines that are thousands of times more powerful than the Sun 3/50 and 386/33 I first used for X windows in the 1980s really is a good start.
So if I want to have my desktop connected to a few dozen target machines using RDP, how do you suggest I do it? Keep a few dozen RDP login windows active? Clunky! At that point I might as well just run a few dozen ssh sessions, or stick to browser-based management applications. RDP is fine if I want to talk to one machine at a time (and in fact my Windows desktop usually has an RDP session to a Windows server on my lab network, which has a few dozen ssh and browser sessions open running management applications, because they're mostly on target machines that don't run X.)
(And if all your foes are spelling or grammar Nazis, that means you only make enemies of intelligent people, which _is_ a step up from the kinds of enemies lots of people have, I suppose....)
My normal work environment is a Win7 laptop, either on a 10 Mbps LAN at work or VPN from home, with Windows Remote Desktop Protocol connection through a firewall to a Win2008 server (currently running on VMware ESXi), which runs browsers and putty SSH connections to a variety of other machines in my lab. For the things it does, it mostly works ok. Cut&paste works pretty well, remote disk mounting is possible though I don't use it much, web pages with no sound and not too much movement render ok. Watching Youtube with sound on fails badly - way too jerky and painfully out of sync. Youtube with the sound off redraws the pictures better, but especially full-screen you can see the redraws happening on the LAN, and worse remotely. Traffic webcams do fine, network performance graphers do fine. On a LAN, it's better than running Motif on a 386/33 was (ok, it's better than that, because I've got a 1920x1080 32-bit screen instead of a 640x480 8-bit screen... but considering that I've got a few thousand times more horsepower now, it ought to be enough better to be extremely transparent.)
So just this morning I had to reboot my Win7 machine, because I had an RDP session that wouldn't die. Was it because I hibernated the machine to bring it in to the office, disconnecting the VPN in the process? I don't know, but the "Are you sure you really want to close the window, we'll save the session for you, is that ok?" dialog box wouldn't go away and wanted to be on top.
Win7 really is a lot better than XP, and XP was a lot better than 95/SE/ME were, but I still have to reboot it a couple of times a month. And stuff doesn't die for no good reason anywhere near as often as it used to (except Firefox, but our work IT department insists on using older versions with long-term support :-) (And at least Firefox saves its sessions relatively cleanly when it dies, unlike IE8.) And since I'm sometimes using an external monitor as well as the laptop screen, when I'm just on the laptop, sometimes there will be windows I can't open because they're on the Other Screen. If I were using X, these things wouldn't be problems.
The important thing about X is very precisely the fact that it's a client-server protocol with network transparency, so the client app doesn't need to be on the same machine as the display server. When I was a sysadmin supporting a bunch of machines, the ability to have lots of windows on my screen that were running clients on lots of different hosts was really valuable, and now that I'm running VMware, I'd be a lot happier if I could do the same thing instead of running a lot of ssh logins and the VMware console widget. It's a bit less critical than it used to be, because lots of the "remote desktop" functionality is built into browsers now, but the tradeoff is big ugly browsers that crash a lot, burn gigabytes of RAM, and aren't very fast.
There are other windowing protocols that also do this (for instance, NeWS, which renders things in Postscript, so what you see is not only what you get, but it's also what you want, and it supports downloading functions to the server so you can avoid round-trips during mouse motion, etc.), but the network transparency is the big win. Running NeWS on an 8MB Sun-3/50 was quite nice, even though these days I've got wristwatches with more horsepower.
No, unfortunately I made the mistake of looking at Twitter, which asploded when the debate started, so I'm still here :-) Time to tune the instruments and head out the door.
The important feature about X Windows was Network Transparency - You could run an application on one computer with its screen output and keyboard and mouse input on a different computer. Sure, there are other ways to do it - lots of ssh sessions, or web browsing (especially with AJAX etc.), or competing window systems like NeWS, or screen emulators like VNC and Windows Remote Desktop - but fundamentally it's a lot cleaner to have some kind of network-transparent window system than to have an application need to drive a "screen" on its own machine.
25 years later, do we still need this? Yes! Virtual machines are taking over the computer business, so you can't expect the application to be running on your desktop (even if it _is_ running in a VM on top of your desktop), screens are a wide range of different sizes and capabilities (laptops, tablets, big monitors, etc., which often don't resemble the machine the app is running on), web browsers are getting used in increasingly complex ways because Windows didn't have a convenient X interface, and there's more and more ugliness around, and more waste of resources trying to emulate things that X did adequately well.
There are lots of good reasons to replace X, but Network Transparency is still the core feature, even if you want the application to have more control over the screen and its associated hardware than we had back in the 1980s, or if you want to move processing functions to different points between the client and the server (e.g. NeWS and NeXT's Display Postscript did some things differently, and Plan 9 and its successors had their own opinions about how to implement everything), but if Wayland doesn't offer Network Transparency yet, it's not an adequate X replacement.
It's not like Obama doesn't have trolls also, but trolls have had more than four years of practice with Obama, and they've occasionally thought of things besides the Birther schtick. But hey, feeding an occasional troll can be fun.
The military-industrial complex likes Romney (especially with Ryan saying that cutting the Pentagon's pork barrel budget is not an option for reducing the deficit), though they haven't been too upset with Obama either (he didn't arrest them all, kept the wars going, and his "cuts" to their budget have been reductions in the rate of increase, not actual cut cuts.) China's also happy that Ryan isn't serious about cutting the deficit. Banksters like Romney's commitment to not regulating them, though they were pretty happy about Obama bailing lots of them out. Vlad Putin wants an American President who's not stupid enough to blow up the world. The Castro Bros are happy if America maintains enough isolation for them to stay in power, instead of opening up travel so they get flooded with tourists spending money the government can't control. Ahmadinejad is happy to have a US president backing Israel's hard-line saber-rattlers enough that he can keep his own country in line by rattling sabers back at them, and knows that the US can't afford to invade Iran. I haven't heard Chavez supporting Obama, but if he did he was probably drunk at the time. At least Obama hasn't sent in the Pentagon to help the oil companies overthrow him. And Morsi? He'd like to be solidly in charge, but his position is too unstable. He can't afford to get Romnesia, but he's waving his Etch-A-Sketch around every week depending on which way the wind is blowing.if a political debate comes on, turn OFF the TV and go out for a drink with your friends! - Let's try this one again...
Perry Metzger tweeted the following suggested political debate drinking game - if a political debate comes on, turn on the TV and go out for a drink with your friends!
(In this case I'm going out for a music jam with friends instead, but it'll do the job.)
Yes. (Ok, probably no, because I'm lazy and didn't like most cars on the market, but I should have done something different when I was in your place :-)
I went through these calculations about a year ago, having driven my mid-80s Chevy van into the ground (well, driven it 110K miles, replaced the engine, driven it another 110K miles, decided not to replace the transmission.) A typical car lasts about 200K miles, so it will use 200K/mpg gallons over its lifetime, gas will cost about $5/gallon, so that's $1million/mpg. (You can quibble about the numbers, but they're in the right ballpark, and $1M is a nice round shiny attractive number.)
That means a 50mpg Prius will need $20K of gas, a 33mpg Honda will need $30K of gas, a 20mpg minivan will need $50K of gas, and 11mpg BMW will need $90K of gas. The Prius cost about $8K more than the 33mpg car I bought, and would have saved about $10K of gas, so that's pretty close. And 2013 car engine models are a few mpg better than the mid-2012 models (I got an early-2012; a bunch of manufacturers didn't have their new engine models out until October/November.)
What I obviously should have done was replace my van with a Prius a couple of years ago when I started a job with a long commute, when there was still a huge tax deduction for buying Priuses - the second van engine only got about 13mpg, so I probably spent $15-20K in gas during its last 50,000 miles. Making a car isn't zero-footprint for the environment, but I was burning through twice its weight in gasoline a year.
Two tanks of gas ago, the radio was reporting $3.99 as the lowest price in half a dozen parts of the Bay Area, and I was mainly seeing under $4.10 at the cheaper stations and $4.20-4.30 at the pricier ones. This week my local cheap station jumped from $3.99 to to $4.07 and then to $4.47 for cash, 10c more for credit. Today in San Francisco the cheaper stations were mostly $4.49 and the expensive ones were $4.75 (though I haven't driven that route recently enough to know what their usual price gap is.)
I haven't tried Diaspora, but while they did need to get the technology to be marginally adequate, so they don't alienate users, their biggest hurdle was going to be to get users to adopt it in the first place. The reason to join Facebook was never that it was technically cool, it was that it was at least marginally usable and half a billion other people were joining it, including your relatives and you actual in-real-life friends and the people you went to high school with and the people who you used to know on Myspace and that girl you met hula-hooping outside the concert the other night.
And the reason to stay on Facebook was not only to talk to those people, but because you got hooked on Farmville when one of your not-actually-real-life friends sent you a shrubbery and you decided to put out a hit on your other friend who'd just become Godfather in Mafia Wars, so you got sucked into the online cow-clicking game environment, plus it was what your friends started using for party announcements. And the combination of Facebook and its add-ons was enough to keep lots of people sticking around there to be marketable eyeballs instead of migrating off to the next such mud/LambdaMoo/Friendster/Orkut/LiveJournal/MySpace/Instagram competitor, maybe not forever but at least long enough to get an IPO out the door.
Diaspora had to find ways to attract some of those users, enough to get social critical mass. If the technology was too broken to get people to stick around after the initial "We're Not Facebook" PR campaign, it could be too hard to get those people back after fixing it (and without enough users, it's hard to get the momentum to get it fixed.) So what's next - CryptoCat?
Hardly an innovation - people have been wearing fake leather and fake fur for a long time. (That's not even counting the kinksters wearing latex or vinyl because they like how it feels.)
You've probably seen Vegan Black Metal Chef's rubber outfit that looks a lot like leather-based metal-head outfits. (And if you haven't, you really should.)
There have been some sensible, non-crazy Muslims being interviewed on the radio in the past week, and while they haven't been boring, they've been on National Public Radio, which is the wrong network to listen to when you need your fix of crazy.
The real question you should be asking yourself, punk, is why aren't there any sensible non-crazy Muslims standing up on Fox News and denouncing these lunatics.
Sensible non-crazy Muslims get tired of being blamed for all this crap. And when they do speak up and try to do something long-term about it, like Feisal Abdul Rauf, crazy non-sensible Muslim-haters go all Pam Geller on them and accuse them of building terrorist victory mosques. (Hint, Rauf's a Sufi - the attacks made about as much sense as attacking Quakers for supporting terrorism.) (Not that that stops the FBI from infiltrating Quaker peace groups, of course, or Al-Qaeda and their Wahhabi buddies from tearing down Sufi shrines, or Persian imams from declaring fatwas against Salmon Rushdie or the Baha'is.)
Maybe they started because of fear, but greed was a big factor as well. Lots of cool stuff to steal if you invaded the Middle East.
And "Arab" isn't necessarily the right term - much of the Muslim invasion of Europe was done by Turks, who aren't Arabs.
Yeah, blasphemy laws are pretty strongly religious intolerance - even though blasphemy laws are also strong protections against religious intolerance (for some religions. Probably not yours.)
In Saudi Arabia, it's illegal to teach polytheism. Christianity and Judaism may not be treated well, but they're tolerated as religions that worship the same One True God that Abraham worshiped even though they haven't yet accepted that Mohammad came to teach the world more about God, and even though the Muslims think the Christians have really strange ways of counting up to "One". But the Middle Eastern pagan pantheons that predated monotheism are Right Out, and Hinduism is also polytheist (even with the "everything is really All One" parts of Hinduism.) And Islam is even more insistent on banning idols than 16th and 17th-century Protestants were in the Europe's religious wars.
For the most part, Hinduism isn't as hung up about blasphemy as the monotheistic religions are, unless you happen to run into the Shiv Sena on a bad day, but if they're going to pass any blasphemy laws they'd probably include banning preaching monotheism and certainly include a ban on disrespectfully destroying statues of the gods and shrines to the gods.
Yes, there are some sets of Islamic right-wingers who don't want women to be educated, just like there are American right-wingers who think a woman's place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
But there are lots more Muslims who want all of their kids to be educated, and who want everybody else's kids to be educated as well, and want their kids to grow up to be educated adults. And even most sexist pigs who want their wives to stay home in the kitchen still want them to be educated enough to educate their kids, which is a job that happens at home as well as school, and want their daughters to be able to get the best husbands they can so they'll have good grandchildren and take care of their parents in their old age. And they want their wives to be able to help run the farm or the shop or whatever they're doing.
And the people who move off the farm and out of the village and go to the big city, like most of the world's population is doing? All of them realize that education is the key to survival.
If your main use of the computer is web, email, etc., then an 8GB SSD running your operating system and applications can make a significant startup difference - and it's probably $20 these days.
Yarrr! Obviously a town named Eichberg is in the mountains, but they've got a creek, and they're about 5km from the Rhein River, where there's all sorts of opportunity for river piracy, Lorelei sirens, and the border with Austria. And about 30km away is Lake Constance (or Bodensee, in German), which is certainly big enough for piracy.
Actually we're mostly using the underground laboratory to test firewalls, intrusion detection hardware, VPN tunnel servers, and occasionally routers. And we're testing management systems for all of the above. (And for Anonymous Coward's comment, we don't have a couple megawatts, but we're up to about 200 amps or so :-)
Our corporate real estate mafia are moving us to an undisclosed location next year (we're assuming it's the main office up the road, where they're moving the people upstairs from us who have normal desks.)